Adam Haiun, I Am Looking for You in the No-Place Grid

 

Thefull-length debut by Montreal poet Adam Haiun is the intriguing I Am Looking for You in the No-Place Grid (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2025), a bookof lines, grids and shapes set across each other in lengths. I might imaginethat if the late Canadian poet and dramatist Wilfred Watson (1911-1998), once famousfor his own grid poems (but more enduringly well-known as being the husband ofwriter Sheila Watson), had been able to shake Modernism, he might have emergedas Adam Haiun. I Am Looking for You in the No-Place Grid offers a longpoem sketchbook of narrative threads set in overlapping text, overlappinggrids, moving in multiple directions simultaneously, and deliciously difficultto replicate in the form of a review (although I shall make an attempt). “Andwhere am I to / be found in this equation.” he writes, early on in the assemblageof untitled pieces, set in the table of contents as a listing of first linesdemarking self-contained pieces, twenty-one in all. “The head the hindquartersintact / the heart presumably obliterated / if any logic governs the placement/ of organs. And you only notice / today how there are little grey / apartmentsabove that grocery / store. The miniaturizing impulse. / In terms of the heart.In relation / to the glands. All the pungency / of the ripe orange in the stairwell/ and the recognition of the smell / as belonging to her very pits. The /stretch of land that constitutes a / lesson from out of the past. The / engorgement.”

Theauthor’s note at the end of the collection—“Although I wrote this book in thevoice of a digital speaker, I employed no generative software in itscomposition.—suggests a kind of polyvocality of not just overlapping text butoverlapping sound, furthering structural echoes of some of the work of Montreal poet, translator and performer Oana Avasilichioaei’s own explorations aroundsound, language, meaning and performance, most recently through her seventhfull-length collection, Chambersonic (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2024)[see my review of such here] (although there are numerous over the years thathave played with an overlapping of text, certainly, from Chris Turnbull tobpNichol to jwcurry, among others). Haiun’s overlapping sentences and phrases playthe glitch and stagger, overlay and staccato of fragments across a far broadertapestry of construction and destruction, how things are built and how theyfall apart. Every sentence a further step across an endless stretch ofnarrative across the length and breath of the long poem, as he writes, mid-waythrough the collection: “The head the hindquarters intact / the heartpresumably obliterated / if any logic governs the placement / of organs. And youonly notice / today how there are little grey / apartments above that grocery /store. The miniaturizing impulse. / In terms of the heart. In relation / to theglands. All the pungency / of the ripe orange in the stairwell / and the recognitionof the smell / as belonging to her very pits.”